The setting of boundaries is always a political act. Boundaries determine
membership: someone must be inside and someone outside. Boundaries
also create and delineate space to facilitate the activities and purposes
of political, economic, and social life. Using physical space to create
social place is a long and deep American tradition.

Gated communities, one of the more dramatic forms of residential
boundaries, have been springing up around the country since the early
1980s. Millions of Americans have chosen to live in walled and fenced
communal residential space that was previously integrated with the
larger shared civic space. Civic space is more than a political or
jurisdictional construct. It is a manifestation of society, culture, and the
shared polity.

In this era of dramatic demographic, economic and social change,
there is a growing fear about the future in America. Many feel
vulnerable, unsure of their place and the stability of their neighborhoods
in the face of rapid change. This is reflected in an increasing fear of crime
that is unrelated to actual crime trends or locations, and in the growing
number of methods used to control the physical environment for
physical and economic security. The phenomenon of walled cities and gated
communities is a dramatic manifestation of a new fortress mentality growing
in America. Gates, fences, and private security guards, like exclusionary
land-use policies, development regulations, and an assortment of other
planning tools, are means of control, used to restrict or limit access to
residential, commercial, and public spaces.

Americans are electing to live behind walls with active security
mechanisms to prevent intrusion into their private domains. Americans
of all classes are forting up, attempting to secure the value of their
houses, reduce or escape from the impact of crime, and find neighbors
who share their sense of the good life. The new fortress developments
are predominantly suburban, with a growing number of urban inner-city
counterparts. They are, however, more than walled-off areas and refuges
from urban violence and a rapidly changing society. They are also a
search for sociospatial community--the ideal community that
Americans have sought since the landing of the Pilgrims.

Gated communities are residential areas with restricted access in
which normally public spaces are privatized. They are security
developments with designated perimeters, usually walls or fences, and
controlled entrances that are intended to prevent penetration by
nonresidents. They include new developments and older areas
retrofitted with gates and fences, and they are found from the inner cities
to the exurbs and from the richest neighborhoods to the poorest. Their
gates range from elaborate two-story guardhouses staffed twenty-four
hours a day to roll-back wrought-iron gates to simple electronic arms.
Guardhouses are usually built with one lane for guests and visitors and a
second lane for residents, who may open the gates with an electronic
card, a code, or a remote control device. Some communities with
round-the-clock security require all cars to pass the guard, issuing
identification stickers for residents' cars. Others use video cameras to
record the license plate numbers and sometimes the faces of all who pass
through. Entrances without guards have intercom systems, some with
video monitors, that residents may use to screen visitors.

The residences we are discussing are not multi-unit, high-density
apartment and condominium buildings with security systems or doormen
in which gates or guards prevent public access to lobbies, hallways, and
parking lots. Gated communities are different: their walls and fences
preclude public access to streets, sidewalks, parks, beaches, rivers, trails,
playgrounds--all resources that without gates or walls would be open
and shared by all the citizens of a locality.

We estimate that more than 3 million American households have
already sought out this new refuge from the problems of urbanization. In
1985 gated communities existed in only a handful of places. Today they
can be found in every major metropolitan area. These developments in
part reflect the notion of community as an island, a social bulwark
against the general degradation of the urban social order; they also
reflect the increasing attempt to substitute private controls for public
organization, for the joint responsibilities of democratic citizenship all
of us share. Gates and walls are not necessary or natural consequences
of these social trends, or causes of them; they are, rather, a dramatic
manifestation of them.

Gates and fences around our neighborhoods represent more than
simple physical barriers. Gated communities manifest a number of
tensions: between exclusionary aspirations rooted in fear and protection
of privilege and the values of civic responsibility; between the trend
toward privatization of public services and the ideals of the public good
and general welfare; and between the need for personal and community
control of the environment and the dangers of making outsiders of fellow
citizens.

The gated communities phenomenon has enormous policy
consequences. It allows some citizens to secede from public contact,
excluding others from sharing in their economic and social privilege. This
result raises an ideological question that prompts polarized viewpoints.
Are gated communities a metaphor of the exclusionary fortress, creating
walls between citizens, or are they refuges from the forces that threaten
family, economic security, and quality of life?

Underlying our study is the question of how gated communities
reflect community and citizenship in America. The real issue is not about
the actual gates and walls, but why so many feel they need them. What
is the measure of nationhood when the divisions between
neighborhoods require guards and fences to keep out other citizens?
When public services and even local government are privatized, when
the community of responsibility stops at the subdivision gates, what
happens to the function and the very idea of a social and political
democracy? Can this nation fulfill its social contract in the absence of
social contact?

The Evolution of Gated Communities

Gated and walled cities are as old as city-building itself. In England the
earliest gated communities were built by the occupying Romans around
300 B.C. Roman soldiers were given land and estates in tribal areas after
their term of service in the army in order to buttress and stabilize Roman
order in the vast and sparsely defended countryside. Roman families
clustered near or within the manor precinct and erected walls and other
defenses. Contrary to popular belief, the walls around these settlements
were seldom to protect against external invaders but rather to guard
against the local villagers who might turn on the baron at any moment.
Tribespeople often rebelled against their masters for real and imagined
grievances. Later, fortresses also served to protect against invaders or
internal warring factions.

Thus the systems of walls and class division was deeply ingrained
in England. Successive kings Henry I, Richard II, and Charles II holed up
in the Tower of London to protect themselves against either rebellious
nobles or hostile and dangerous villagers. London had no police force
until the eighteenth century, so people of means forted up to protect
themselves and their clans from the savagery of the local population.
The heritage of this system can still be seen on the English landscape in
the walled abbeys, manors, and castles.

Walled and gated military settlements were also built in the New
World, with the earliest being the Spanish fort towns in the Caribbean.
Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century did the first purely
residential gated neighborhoods appear. Upper-income gated
developments like New York's Tuxedo Park and the private streets of St.
Louis were built in the late 1800s by wealthy citizens to insulate
themselves from the troublesome aspects of rapidly industrializing
cities. During the twentieth century more gated, fenced compounds
were built by members of the East Coast and Hollywood aristocracies for
privacy, protection, and prestige. But these early gated preserves were
different from the gated subdivisions of today. They were uncommon
places for uncommon people.

Gated communities remained rarities until the advent of the
master-planned retirement developments of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Retirement developments like Leisure World were the first places where
average Americans could wall themselves off. Gates soon spread to
resorts and country club developments, and then to middle-class
suburban subdivisions. In the 1980s, upscale real estate speculation and
the trend to conspicuous consumption saw the proliferation of gated communities
around golf courses that were designed for exclusivity, prestige, and leisure.
The decade also marked the emergence of gated communities built
primarily out of fear, as the public became increasingly preoccupied with
violent crime. Gates became available in developments of suburban
single-family tracts and high-density urban apartment complexes. Since
the late 1980s, gates have become ubiquitous in many areas of the
country; there are now entire incorporated cities that feature guarded
entrances.

Because gated communities in their contemporary form first began in
resort and retirement areas, they are most common in the Sunbelt states
of the Southeast and Southwest. Thereafter they began to appear in
metropolitan areas in all parts of the country. They came later to the
Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest, where the trend toward gating is
now growing rapidly. In absolute numbers, California and Florida are
home to the most gated communities, with Texas running a distant third.
Gated communities are also common around New York City, Chicago,
and other major metropolitan areas, but they are found nearly
everywhere--in Oregon, Washington, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Kansas, Missouri,
Michigan, Nevada, and the District of Columbia suburbs of Virginia and
Maryland. Because they are primarily a phenomenon of metropolitan
agglomerations, they are rare in largely rural states like the Dakotas,
Vermont, and West Virginia (see figure 1-1).

Although early gated communities were restricted to retirement
villages and compounds for the super rich, the majority of the newer
settlements of the 1970s to 1990s are middle to upper-middle class.
Higher-end tracts in planned communities are now commonly gated.
Gates are more common in larger tracts because there are more units over
which to spread the cost of walling, gating, and constructing and
staffing guardhouses. For similar reasons, they also are more common in
townhouse and other higher-density developments, where unit costs are
often low enough to place gates within the reach of the middle class.
However, gates are not yet commonplace for the lower end of the income
spectrum, even in California. We estimate that one-third of the
developments built with gates are luxury developments for the upper and
upper-middle class, and perhaps another third are retirement oriented
(see figure 1-2). The remainder are mostly for the middle class, although
there are a growing number of working-class gated communities.

We estimate in 1997 that there are as many as 20,000 gated
communities, with more than 3 million units. They are increasing
rapidly in number, in all regions and price classes. A leading national real
estate developer estimates that eight out of every ten new urban projects
are gated. Suburban fortified developments are also proliferating. In
1988 one-third of the 140 projects in development in Orange County,
California, were gated, double the proportion just five years earlier. In
1989 a construction company in the area reported three times the demand
for gated communities as for nongated communities. In the nearby
San Fernando Valley, there were approximately a hundred gated
communities in existence by the end of the 1980s, nearly all built since
1979. A 1990 survey of southern California home shoppers found that
54 percent wanted a home in a gated, walled development; the question
had not even been asked a handful of years earlier. On Long Island,
gated communities were rare in the mid-1980s, but by the mid-1990s they
had become common, with a gatehouse included in almost every condominium
development of more than fifty units. Chicago, suburban
Atlanta, and nearly all other large U.S. cities report similar trends.

Economic and social segregation are not new. In fact, zoning and
city planning were designed, in part, to preserve the position of the
privileged with subtle variances in building and density codes. But gated
communities go further in several respects than other means of
exclusion. They create physical barriers to access. They also privatize
community space, not merely individual space. Many gated areas also
privatize civic responsibilities like police protection and communal
services such as street maintenance, recreation, and entertainment. The
new developments can create a private world that need share little with
its neighbors or with the larger political system.

The first step in creating this private world is controlling access to it.
From the beginning, the suburbs have intended to separate their
residents, first from the city and later even from each other. Over time,
developers have devised many means of controlling access. Street
design was the original and favored technique for providing exclusivity
and privacy in the suburbs. Michael Southworth has documented how
developers progressively sealed off suburban residential areas by
altering the old grid street patterns, moving from the gridiron to
interrupted parallels, to loops and lollipops. These street patterns
thwarted easy automobile access and created successively more
self-contained, self-focused, and unconnected subdivisions that made it
easier for residents to control their own space. The move away from the
grid was an intentional device, similar to the gate today. Convoluted
dead-end streets limit access and restrict who enters the area by acting
as a deterrent to all nonresidents--casual visitors as well as criminals
(see figure 1-3).

Many other forms of control of access and space, less tangible than
street design, have been developed over the decades. These have
included single-use zoning and inaccessibility to public transit. As the
suburban form developed, one of the most important changes besides
street patterns was that public buildings and public spaces no longer
anchored the center of a town. The new, solely residential developments
were designed to focus inward, emphasizing private over public space.
Private backyards and fenced-in areas shielded neighbors from one
another. The carport or garage replaced the porch in the front of the
house, reorienting the dwelling unit to its rear, away from the street,
neighbors, and other people. With the decline of public space, increasingly
sophisticated and complete private subdivision amenities emerged as a
replacement for the common street front and easy communications
across porches and front yards. Gating of this inwardly focused
residential space became a natural and almost predictable development
along the continuum of ever-reduced inter- and intra-communal
communications.

Today gates and walls, much more hard and fixed barriers than street
patterns, control entrance and egress in suburban subdivisions and
urban neighborhoods around the country. Along with the trend toward
gating in the suburbs, city neighborhoods are also using barricades and
gates with increasing frequency. In neighborhoods built on the old grid
pattern, street closures attempt to simulate the suburban pattern by
altering access. It is there, in the older neighborhoods retrofitted with
gates, that we see the intention behind gates most clearly, much more
clearly than in pristine new subdivisions built with guardhouses. Gates
are a more intense and obvious method of controlling access than the
older, more subtle suburban designs, but they are not an entirely new
phenomenon. They are the outgrowth of decades of suburban design
and public land-use policy. Gates are firmly within the suburban tradition:
they enhance and harden the suburbanness of the suburbs, and they attempt
to suburbanize the city.

The Suburbs as Utopias

Gated communities are part of the trend of suburbanization, and their
roots lie in the same urban design tradition. The suburb is a distinctly
American form, but its roots can be traced to nineteenth-century
England. The artificial village features we find in planned unit
developments are vestiges of the development of English country homes
in the industrial era. Emulating the landed country gentry, merchants and
industrialists built small country estates in or on the fringe of remote
villages that lay along the new paved highways developed during the
reign of George III. Those same towns received the first rails as well.
Over time, more rapid transportation opened country living to people
with money, not merely those with landed wealth and inherited social
position.

In the United States, a similar pattern of transportation
improvements spelled the end of the walking city and fostered the
growth of the suburbs. And while the associations of peerage
disappeared in the New World, the trappings of class and status
remained. Only prosperous, established citizens could afford to commute
to the city. The earliest developer-planned suburb, New Brighton on
Long Island, offered what suburban developers still advertise: "the
means of withdrawing from the labor and anxiety of commerce to the
quiet of their own families."

Suburbs are not a recent innovation of market-driven developers.
They have a long utopian history of famous designers and visionaries
attempting to create the good life and the good society. Intentional
community design can be traced back to Robert Owens in the late
eighteenth century. Owens and his French contemporary Charles Fourier
were among the first in the Western tradition to suggest that the
place-form could affect human emotions and influence social systems:
"The ideas informing the communal life style--perfectibility, order,
brotherhood, merging of mind and body, experimentation, and the
community's uniqueness--all represent its intentional quality, with
harmony as their principal theme: harmony with nature, harmony among
people, and harmony between spirit and the flesh."

Later, in the nineteenth century, designers such as Frederick Law
Olmsted and Frank Lloyd Wright created utopian environments around
curvilinear streets or cur-de-sacs, building self-contained, separate
developments with carefully constructed identities (see figure 1-4). The
earliest suburbs offered the same features that attract residents today:
quality housing, security, proximity to city amenities, and exclusivity.

No architect had more influence on the American suburban form
than Frank Lloyd Wright. His house form--a single-story, servantless
dwelling of grace and elegance--created the archetype for the suburban
home and made it the preferred and envied housing type of middle-class
America. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it, Norman Rockwell articulated it,
and the movies and television popularized and glamorized it. This style
of housing allowed middle-class mobility with comfort and efficiency and
provided for easy subdivision assembly on a large scale based on a
master plan. The Wright suburban form found its way into "modern
communities" designed by Olmsted and others in Berkeley,
California, Tarrytown Heights, New York, and Riverside, Illinois. Their
streetcar suburbs were in turn the precursors to the auto suburbs of
Levittown and the modern bedroom communities.

The suburb, sign of middle-class rank and position, has been
city-averse from its beginning. The English merchant, the American
industrialist, and later the middle-class American worker all were trying
to escape the city. In the case of the English, the flight to the suburbs
was an escape from the unhealthy and uncomfortable dirt and congestion of
industrial London. But even as the suburbs might be an escape or a
respite, London was still perceived as the action center, and suburban
dwellings were second homes, used for weekend and summer retreats.
As Samuel Johnson said, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of
life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

The American suburb is very different in character and intention.
Unlike its English predecessor, it became the primary residential locus
very early in the industrialization process. The American merchant class
could not afford two dwellings. Moreover, land in this country was
cheap and open space plentiful. Thus, while industrial development
spawned urbanization, it also created suburbanization as a component of
this process. As early as 1815 a new middle class was emerging and
finding its way out of the central cities. Brooklyn Heights, for example,
was a suburb away from Manhattan, as were most of the Bronx, Long
Island, and Yonkers. By 1911, three years after manufacture of the first
mass-produced Ford began, 38 percent of New York's lawyers already
lived outside the borough of Manhattan.

The creators of the suburbs did everything they could to dissociate
their developments from the city. Names of developments were usually
built around words like "park," "forest," "river," "hills," or "valley,"
mixed with "view," "park," or "estates." The resulting Forest Parks and
Green Valley Estates were meant to conjure up bucolic rural imagery and
only coincidentally to reflect the actual landscape.

As Kenneth Jackson documents, the flight to the suburbs has been
going on for decades, although it has sometimes been masked by
aggressive annexation strategies that incorporated suburbs into the city
limits. Nowhere is this more clearly manifested than in Los Angeles,
where the old city names of Hollywood, San Fernando, Pico, Westwood,
and Studio City have more civic identity than the city that annexed them.
But the era in which suburbs were incorporated into growing cities is
long over, and the physical, social, and economic distinctions between
city and suburb are sharper than ever. A majority of Americans now live
in suburbs. Driven by lower costs and the desire to avoid low-income
minorities (who are equated with crime) and other urban problems, the
expansion of the suburbs is likely to accelerate as development moves
ever farther out, supported by and leapfrogging beyond the new
economic centers of the edge cities.

The suburbs are meant to fulfill a number of aspirations: they should
offer close proximity to nature; they should be safe; they should have
good education and good kids in the schools; they should shelter
residents from social deviance of every form; they should be clean and
friendly; they should keep out or limit anything that varies from their
physical form and architecture. But suburbs are no longer as uniform or
as racially and ethnically sterile as that ideal. Demographic, social, and
cultural changes have permeated society, and the suburbs are changing
and diversifying. As the suburbs age and become more diverse, they
have encountered problems once thought of as urban: crime, vandalism,
disinvestment, and blight.

"Suburban" no longer automatically means safe, beautiful, or ideal.
The automobile, the rising middle-class minorities of Asians, Hispanics,
and African Americans, and equal housing access laws have made it
difficult for the white middle class to find refuge in suburban distance
alone. And no place is truly safe. If security cannot be found in location
alone, perhaps it can be found in a development type--the gated
community. And perhaps the much-longed-for community of face-to-face
contact in a defined neighborhood territory can also be found behind
walls.